If you want more than just a “hello world” app, Star Track is a great example. It uses Framework7 which is a beautiful framework for cross-platform development. The app is going to serve as the basis for documentation from the PhoneGap team, so be sure to subscribe to their blog.

Retro-computing

It’s amazing to think that there are people out there who still make games and the like for the old 8-bit computers. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole to go down should you ever want to spend a few days procrastinating. Via a Reddit post I came across the NOMAM 2016 Basic Tenliners Competition. As the name suggests, these are BASIC games that are no longer than 10 lines long. Of course, lots of tricks are pulled to make this work — BASIC, like many other programming languages, supports multiple statements per line, so this isn’t the same thing as a 10-statement BASIC program. Some of the games are actually quite impressive! Kevin Savetz goes through the Atari programs on YouTube, so if you don’t want to download the programs, the videos give you an idea as to what the games look like.

Science

Apparently Japanese priests collected almost seven centuries of climate data (via Hacker News), and the records confirm what we already know: the climate is changing quickly, and we’d better start paying attention (as a collective). Unfortunately, anything we do now will only partially mitigate the damage we’ve already caused, but even a little bit of mitigation is better than none at all.